Box Plots

Box plots are good to use:

When graphically you want to depicte groups through their quartiles.
When you want to show outliers (i.e. points past the whiskers of the box and whisker plots).
When you want quickly compare distributions of several groups.

Basic Box Plot

import plotly.graph_objects as go
import pandas as pd
from plotly.offline import init_notebook_mode, plot
from IPython.core.display import display, HTML
init_notebook_mode(connected=True)

#Let use the cars dataset for this
mtcars = pd.read_table('https://raw.githubusercontent.com/plotly/datasets/master/mpg_2017.txt',sep='\t')


fig = go.Figure()

fig.add_trace(go.Box(y = mtcars['cty'],
                     name = 'City MPG'))

fig.add_trace(go.Box(y = mtcars['hwy'],
                     name = 'Highway MPG'))

fig.update_layout(title_text='City & Highway MPG')

plot(fig, filename = 'figure8-7-1.html')
display(HTML('figure8-7-1.html'))

Customizing Box Charts

# Additional Styling Options
fig = go.Figure()
fig.add_trace(go.Box(
    y=mtcars['cty'],
    name="All Points",
    jitter=0.3,
    pointpos=-1.8,
    boxpoints='all', # represent all points
    marker_color='rgb(7,40,89)',
    line_color='rgb(7,40,89)'
))

fig.add_trace(go.Box(
    y=mtcars['cty'],
    name="Only Whiskers",
    boxpoints=False, # no data points
    marker_color='rgb(9,56,125)',
    line_color='rgb(9,56,125)'
))

fig.add_trace(go.Box(
    y=mtcars['cty'],
    name="Suspected Outliers",
    boxpoints='suspectedoutliers', # only suspected outliers
    marker=dict(
        color='rgb(8,81,156)',
        outliercolor='rgba(219, 64, 82, 0.6)',
        line=dict(
            outliercolor='rgba(219, 64, 82, 0.6)',
            outlierwidth=2)),
    line_color='rgb(8,81,156)'
))

fig.add_trace(go.Box(
    y=mtcars['cty'],
    name="Whiskers and Outliers",
    boxpoints='outliers', # only outliers
    marker_color='rgb(107,174,214)',
    line_color='rgb(107,174,214)'
))

fig.update_layout(title_text="Box Plot Styling Outliers")

plot(fig, filename = 'figure8-7-2.html')
display(HTML('figure8-7-2.html'))